Nathan,
Re your comment below:
"Whatever you do, don't watch the movie adaptation. It's the
worst Chandler adaptation ever, and it's shot entirely in the
first person-the only time you see the detective is when he
looks in the mirror, and he's not a detective he's a writer
and there's a love story, and it's set at Christmas. In
short, Hollywood did everything possible to ruin one of
Chandler's best works."
It's far from the best Chandler adaptation, but it's nowhere
near the worst. That distinction is now, and ever shall be,
the exclusive property of Robert Altman's THE LONG
GOODBYE.
In the film version of TLITL, Marlowe IS a private eye. He's
TRYING to be a writer (not unlike Dashiell Hammett) and has
fictionalized one of his cases and sent it off to a pulp
publisher. One of the editors of the magazine company becomes
his client.
The original version of the script, with its many changes
from the original novel, was actually by Chandler. The
studio, of all things, objected to the many changes Chandler
made, and hired another, lesser, mystery novelist, Steve
Fisher, to do a rewrite. Chandler was so displeased with the
rewrite that he removed his name from the credits, other than
as the writer of the source material.
Fisher claimed that he did little other than complete the
script and make some fairly minor revisions to the part
Chandler had already completed. It was, presumably, Chandler
who changed the business setting from, IIRC, a perfume
company to a pulp magazine publisher (a business both he and
Fisher would have been familiar with). And, IIRC, in the
short story version of TLITL, the business was something else
altogether. This lends some credence to the conclusion that
it was Chandler who made the change when he adapted the novel
into a screenplay, since he had already made a a similar
change when he adapted the the short story into a novel
(incorporating elements of another short story, "Bay City
Blues," when he did he expansion).
As for the finished film directed by Robert Montgomery, who
also played Marlowe, a lot of it doesn't work. The whole
subjective camera gimmick is just that, a gimmick. And
Montgomery's Marlowe comes across less as tough and clever
than mean-spirited and bloody-minded.
On the other hand, there are fine performances by Lloyd Nolan
as the brutal Bay City cop, DeGarmo, Joyce Meadows as a
temptress, and Tom Tully as a basically decent police
captain. And a lot of the dialog is sharp and distinctly
Chandler-like.
Worth seeing if only because it's the only Marlowe film on
which Chandler actually contributed to the script.
JIM DOHERTY
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